The (Short) "Long" Weekend

"What are you doing this long weekend?"
"The weather for the long weekend ahead should be ideal..."
"Police warn they will be out blitzing the 400-series highways this long weekend.."

Ah, the long weekends of summer. There's nothing better than to relax at your Happy Place, be that your backyard, your cottage, the beach, or what have you, with your beverage of choice in one hand and a lengthy to-do list consisting of...nothing at all..in the other.
We Canadians prize our holiday weekends, probably at least in part because there are so few of them. We got the short end of the holiday stick: every other industrialized country takes more time out of the year to be unindustrious than we do. This fact leaps out at you particularly in the winter months: we make the long trek from New Year's Day to Easter without respite, trudging brain-deep through snow and slush. But our summer is curiously bereft of holiday weekends, too. In fact, only the first weekend (Canada Day) and the last weekend (Labour Day) of a schoolchild's summer are official long weekends.
That's right, folks: this one doesn't count.
Oh, at first glance, it looks like a long weekend. The government's off Monday--wait, that's a poor indicator of a holiday, since the government seems to take off at the drop of a hat. Okay, well, offices are closed and their workers are paid; factories are closed and their workers are paid; stores are...
...open.
Most of them, anyway: store owners are under no obligation to close, nor to dole out stat holiday pay, for the Civic Holiday. (In Ontario, the real name of this pseudo-holiday is Simcoe Day, after John Graves Simcoe, a pioneer who founded Toronto and had a town (nowhere near Toronto), a lake (not in Toronto) , and a whack of other things named after him. Pretty important guy. Not important enough, alas, to shut down the engine of commerce in his name.
I'm not out here typing for pity (well, maybe I am, a little, you lucky bastards). I want to see the first Monday in August made an official, statutory holiday in some other province besides Alberta (where it's Family Day). If that's not possible (and I see no reason why it shouldn't be), I'd like to see and hear some recognition that this isn't a long weekend for all of us. Just once I'd like to hear that.
Just once.